Entertainment

TalkShoe Now Integrated with Ning

Online live interactive podcast host TalkShoe integrated its service with whitelabel social networking service Ning. The two saw a perfect fit with one another, as TalkShoe last year decided to de-emphasize the podcasting part of their technology in favor of the live audio participation angle, and figured that Ning would be a perfect utility for retaining users who would return to participate in live discussions.

Today they announce that TalkShoe voice conferences and TalkCasts can now be more easily integrated into the Ning system. They're providing a number of new badgets and widgets to integrate community calling between up to 250 people at once.

I, myself, am a former TalkCast host, but after they changed their payment plans so that advertisements run in the program were effectively no longer paid on a CPM basis but on the basis of live participants (of which we had none), I quickly left the site. I had assumed that many of the folks I podcasted with at the time stuck around, as most of the users were always big fans of the site.

I spoke to Chris "Chris24" Thomson to get his opinion of the new Ning collaboration features, and how they were helping his podcast, figuring that as one of the sites top TalkCast hosts, he'd have a good perspective. He informed me that he was no longer a member of the site, and he too had left over the constantly shifting payment system. I went down my rolodex of folks who I met on TalkShoe, and none of them were still using the system for their podcast. Chris did have one friend he knew that still used the system for his podcast: Rob White of the New Media Pro podcast.

Rob said that he hadn't seen much in terms of positive audience growth or even usage of the Ning system so far, nor had most of the other fellow TalkShoe users he'd worked with, but for Patti Serrano.

"Patti Serrano setup a Ning page and has around 35 members now, most that have been to or are now coming to her shows," White said. "But most people I have talked to had started a Ning page and couldn't get anyone there to signup. Others have a few users and are begging for people to signup; there are one or two that have members but no longer even update their pages now."

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